Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hygiene, Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety, Graz, AustriaVienna University of Technology, Research Area of Biochemical Technology, Institute of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering, Vienna, Austria

GENOME ANNOUNCEMENT

Serratia marcescens, first described in 1819, belongs to the family of Enterobacteriaceae and is a motile rod-shaped Gram-negative bacterium (1). Serratia species are omnipresent in the environment, and S. marcescens is classified as an important nosocomial pathogen causing a wide range of infections, including, most notably, urinary tract infection and bloodstream infection (2). Besides several potential virulence factors, one important feature of clinical S. marcescens is its ability to acquire antimicrobial resistance. VIM-metallo-β-lactamase (MBL)-producing isolates have the ability to hydrolyze almost all β-lactams and have been described in association with outbreaks worldwide (3).

For whole-genome sequencing, high-molecular-weight DNA was isolated from an overnight culture on Mueller Hinton agar plates (BioMérieux, Marcy-l'Étoile, France) using the MagAttract HMW DNA kit (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany). Using the double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) BR assay kit (Thermo Fisher Scientific, Waltham, MA, USA), 1 ng of input DNA was quantified with a Qubit 2.0 fluorometer (Thermo Fisher Scientific). Library preparation to obtain ready-to-sequence libraries was done with a NexteraXT kit (Illumina, Inc., San Diego, CA, USA). Paired-end sequencing (2 × 300 bp) was performed using a MiSeq system (Illumina, Inc.) and generated 3,174,214 reads from 687,587,445 unassembled nucleotides. Raw reads were de novo assembled into a draft genome using SPAdes version 3.9.0 (4). Contigs were filtered for a minimum coverage of 5 and minimum length of 200 bp, which resulted in 272 contigs with a total of 5,687,772 nucleotides at a coverage of 133-fold.